1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to apparatus and methods for coding and decoding a signal and, more particularly, to apparatus and methods for analyzing and synthesizing analog speech signals.
2. Discussion of Background and Prior Art
Signals, and in particular analog speech signals, are coded for a wide variety of reasons. For example, for many applications, speech signal processing is a bandwidth limited process. Consequently, original analog speech signals typically are coded to compress the signals, i.e., to remove redundant information in the original speech signals that need not be processed in order to reconstruct the signals with quality. The compressed signals can then be, for example, transmitted over a communications data link that is bandwidth limited or stored in a memory of limited storage capacity and ultimately decoded to reconstruct the signals. In general, signal analysis is the overall process by which original signals are converted into compressed signals having most of the information carried in the original signals. Signal synthesis is the overall process used to reconstruct the original signals from the compressed signals.
Two commonly used digital coding techniques for compressing analog speech signals are (1) parametric coding and (2) waveform coding. One example of the parametric coding technique is linear predictive coding, in which the waveforms of the analog speech signals are modeled as the output of a filter which is excited by a linear combination of a "white noise" sequence and a quasi-periodic train of impulses, known as pitch pulses. That is, the parameters that are used to represent the analog speech signals are the values of the coefficients of the filter, the period of the pitch pulses, the amplitude of the pitch pulses and the energy of white noise, all of which can be transmitted or stored digitally. By using these parameters to represent the speech signals, the data rate or number of bits per second (bps), i.e., bandwidth, that is required for speech processing can be reduced significantly. For example, data rates as low as 800 to 2400 bps can be achieved using the linear predictive coding scheme. However, while the data rate is low, the quality of the speech signal reconstructed from these parameters also is undesirably low. The reconstructed speech is intelligible, but does not sound natural.
Waveform coding exploits the correlation between adjacent speech samples of the waveform as well as speech samples that are several samples apart to compress the signal. Generally, waveform coding involves sampling an analog speech signal, quantizing and analog-to-digital (A/D) converting the sampled signals, and then correlating the A/D converted signals, so as to transmit or store only those A/D converted signals having non-redundant information. For speech signals having a maximum frequency content of about 3.4 kHz, the sampling usually occurs at a rate of 8 kHz. As is known, the signal quantization and conversion occurs using waveform coders operating at high bit rates, e.g., 16-32k bits per second, to minimize the introduction of "quantization noise" or distortion into the waveform of the converted signals. A number of different waveform coding systems exist, including systems having waveform coders that employ Delta Modulation (DM), Adaptive Delta Modulation (ADM), Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM), Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM) and Vector Quantization (VQ). Waveform coding has the advantage of being able to reconstruct high quality speech, but at the expense of bandwidth requirements in the range of 16-32k bits per second or higher. At data rates below 16k bits per second, the quality of the reconstructed speech signal is poor. This results from the waveform coder operating at the lower bit rates to quantize and convert the analog signal, which introduces the quantization noise into the A/D converted speech signal .